At the Memphis Safe Task Force roundtable on March 23.
Photo: Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

As travelers languished in hours-long security lines at more than a dozen U.S. airports this week, President Trump boarded Air Force One headed for Memphis. He had a victory lap to take. “We stopped crime!” he declared at an event at the city’s airport. About a year earlier, he had deployed federal troops here as part of his blitz against Democrat-governed jurisdictions. Crime was down 43 percent compared to last March, and Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force, as his administration called the operation, was responsible, according to him. “We still have work to do,” cautioned Memphis mayor Paul Young at a press conference later. Not only was crime still a problem, it was unclear if the president had meaningfully impacted its decline — it had been falling at a rate of about 40 percent for years. But that was besides the point for the administration. This wasn’t about safety. This was theater.

Elsewhere around the country, 150 ICE agents had been dispatched to major travel hubs, ostensibly to help short-staffed TSA agents — none of whom were getting paid because of a fight on Capitol Hill over DHS funding. “ICE was my idea,” the president bragged to reporters. Lines at airports sprawled. Passengers were evidently charged millions of dollars in security fees earmarked to pay TSA officers, who weren’t getting the money. Images shared on social media showed ICE agents standing around and scrolling on their phones. Two agents in San Francisco dragged a woman named Angelina Lopez-Jimenez through the airport while her 9-year-old daughter watched and cried. “This is entirely a manufactured crisis by the Trump administration. It is a shameless, insensitive policy by an uncaring regime,” one person waiting for a flight told the Guardian.

Trump’s self-congratulatory rhetoric about deploying ICE as cavalry comes at a time when almost nothing is going well for him. His approval ratings are in free fall, bottoming out at 36 percent in a survey published on March 24 by Reuters — a second-term low. He’s waging a disastrous war with Iran with no apparent foresight as to how it might end or evident ability to avert the economic shocks it is causing. For more than a month, he has stymied negotiations to end the DHS shutdown. He rebuffed Senate Republicans as they scrambled to get him to agree to fund the department without new money for ICE, only to reverse course this week without explanation. On Thursday, he and Senate leaders finally got a bill passed to fund DHS but not ICE and CBP, giving Democrats exactly what they’ve been asking for all along. But Trump couldn’t sway House Republicans, who counteroffered with a continuing resolution that may prolong the shutdown.

Because applause for his underwhelming efforts has been in short supply, Trump brought to Memphis a panel of administration officials — Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth — to lavish him with praise. At one point, Miller called him a “national treasure,” prompting the president to turn to the director of the FBI and say, “Kash, see if you can top that.” Seated at a long table before an audience of troops and local officials with stacks of cardboard boxes labeled “DEA evidence” arrayed before them, Trump’s co-panelists repeated the unsubstantiated axiom on which the president has hinged both his ICE and military deployments: that the value proposition of his second presidency, to make Americans safe, is being delivered more efficiently than ever.

In reality, Trump’s victory lap in Memphis was a bald expression of how loudly and calamitously the conventional wisdom around safety is imploding. For the past quarter-century, crime rates have declined dramatically nationwide and spiked locally on occasion, with little agreement from experts as to why. This has not stopped politicians and law-enforcement officials from rushing to take credit and assign blame anyway. Trump ran an entire reelection campaign in 2020 on promises to rein in the urban chaos that his opponent, Joe Biden, supposedly encouraged (but that was erupting as Trump himself sat in the White House). Cops now rarely see a crime trend, in either direction, that stops them from insisting on massive expansions in the scale and scope of policing — and, with overwhelming voter support, politicians usually acquiesce. Now, Trump has applied a costly new layer to policing, adding unaccountable and ideological ICE recruits to the taxpayer’s burden.

The advent of the TSA after 9/11 doubled as an experiment that foreshadowed much of what’s happening today: How much security theater will people tolerate if it registers to them as a manageable inconvenience — but as a prohibitive one for those they feel threatened by? The agency’s rampant inefficiency is by now well documented. Tests conducted in 2015 and 2017 found that officers missed more than 80 percent of contraband smuggled through by testers, according to ABC News. Yet we have settled for a world in which, without tens of thousands of TSA officers, an entire essential mode of travel is rendered almost unusable. And this week, by ordering ICE to assist the TSA, Trump imposed yet another layer of security theater on airports. There’s little evidence that either Trump’s upscaling of immigration enforcement or his military adventures abroad are making us safer. But they do capitalize on a desire for violent spectacle. The Feds have delivered more safety by killing U.S. citizens. The military, which Hegseth claimed in Memphis “had lowered its standards, prioritizing equity over merit,” before Trump reassumed office, made us safer by kicking off a war with the apparently accidental bombing of a girls’ elementary school.

Trump seems quite pleased with himself about all this — a new nadir of delusion for an already terminally delusional president. His once-formidable talent for sales has so diminished it’s no longer clear he knows what a bad product he’s selling. After days of denying responsibility for the bombing, Trump has become only less capable of processing how horribly the war is going. Officials give him progress reports in the form of a daily sizzle reel, according to NBC News. Most of it is footage of “stuff blowing up.” When it comes to managing airport security and unpaid government employees, he seems to have resorted to sourcing ideas from radio-talk-show callers — “Linda from Arizona,” who phoned into The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show last Friday, was the first to suggest he send ICE to help TSA. He flew his top brass to a state he won by almost 30 points in 2024 to take credit for a reduction in crime that was already happening without him. The contraband in front of his celebration table was supposed to look like the spoils of a major drug bust. It mostly looked like trash — an apt visual metaphor for how much care Trump is putting into his performance nowadays. “I’m going to Graceland after this,” the old showman mused distractedly.